Trey Parker's Orgazmo has all the qualities of an amateur's film project. It is cheap, overacted and frequently goes for shock value instead of genuinely clever gags. It is also very funny when it works. Imagine standing around the shallow end of a swimming pool but getting sprayed with water as compensation. It isn't as satisfying, but you're still getting wet. When an overweight woman known as the T-Rex mounts Parker's Joe Young during a porno shoot, the obvious sight gag inspires no more than a chuckle, until we get a great dissolve into Young's mind, giving us a visual of how he deals with his unenviable situation.
What is that unenviable situation? Joe Young is a Mormon missionary who travels to Hollywood to introduce the Book of Mormon to the city's population. After meeting with no success, he eventually stumbles onto the home of Maxxx Orbison (Michael Dean Jacobs), a porn maker who is in the middle of a shoot. Joe fends off Maxxx's bodyguards, which impresses Maxxx so much that he decides to offer Joe a deal. For $20,000, Joe can star in a porno movie about a superhero named Orgazmo, who fights crime with an orgazmorator, a gun that can inflict its target with orgasms. Joe is reluctant but he is also engaged to the lovely Lisa (Robyn Lynne), who is back home in Utah. That money would be enough to pay for the wedding, so he agrees.
Much of the film covers Joe's ordeal as he contends with an odd assortment of co-stars and crewmembers. His sidekick is Choda Boy, real name Ben (Dian Bachar), who has two Ph.D.s from M.I.T. but likes the action he gets from appearing in porn. Joe must also conceal his activities from Lisa, who thinks Joe is appearing in a legitimate movie. There is also a subplot concerning a sushi restaurant run by G-Fresh (Masao Maki), a friend of Ben, and how he must fend off a pushy nightclub owner who wants to buy the property. These storylines serve to deliver an array of hit-or-miss jokes that are responsible for the movie's NC-17 rating.
One of the better jokes involves Ben's invention, an actual orgazmorator. He and Joe take it out for a test drive, zapping several bystanders and giving them multiple orgasms right on the street. Trey Parker's South Park writing partner Matt Stone appears as a dopey photographer who assures everyone that he is not a queer, in a joke that escalates in hilarity every time he appears on screen. Since this is a movie about porn, there are several cameo appearances by actual porn performers like Ron Jeremy and Juli Ashton. I can only speculate why Parker included them (irony, perhaps?), but this movie could actually serve as a quiz for porn consumers to see how many they could identify. I know of Ron Jeremy due to his limited crossover success (like appearing on the game show The Weakest Link), and I identified the sleazy Max Hardcore because I read about him a while back. That's two for me. Perhaps you'll do better.
What prevents Orgazmo from being a better movie is its uneven momentum. Parker seems to think that hairy asses are funny all by themselves, so we see several of them up close. Nudity is rarely funny. It is typically how other characters react to nudity that is funny. Nadia undressing in Jim's bedroom in American Pie isn't funny, but it's the reaction of the three boys watching on their webcam that is funny, along with the plan backfiring when Jim has to strip while the whole school is watching (which he doesn't know, and that's the key). How about Porky's, in which the boys are peaking at the girls in the gym shower? Not funny, until Tommy improvises, ending with his penis firmly in the hands of Miss Balbricker.
There is still a lot to like about Orgazmo. Despite its shortcomings, it's fearless. Whenever it falls flat it just gets up to dust itself off and continue. It never runs out of steam. The best performance belongs to Parker and Stone's college pal Dian Bachar, who would go on to co-star with them in BASEketball. He's energetic and adept at physical comedy and delivering humorous lines. I would be remiss not to mention the fantastic theme song "Now You're a Man," written by Trey Parker, proving himself to be a highly gifted musician. Orgazmo came out in 1998, early into South Park's run and with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, Team America and an acclaimed Broadway musical still to come. Parker and Stone were just getting started.
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